As most of you have discovered, Tokara Solutions has broadened the scope of its professional services consulting around marketing automation by becoming a Marketo partner. As an Agency partner, our CRM, business intelligence, and marketing automation consultants are now able to bring you all the benefits of Marketo, an industry leader in marketing automation software, ranking for consecutive years in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Lead Management.
To refine our readers’ understanding around the range of benefits Marketo offers to companies who make use of its marketing automation software, this blog series is exploring some of the features this technology offers to enable you to quickly and easily get the most out of your marketing efforts – minimizing the effort required to achieve maximum sales and marketing results. In this post, we’ll focus on inbound marketing services.
In the most basic sense, inbound marketing differs substantially from what most consider to be ‘traditional marketing’ — which includes outbound activities such as print advertising, direct mail, and attendance at tradeshows and conferences. While these types of ‘outbound’ marketing efforts may still have considerable value depending on your industry and audience, when used in isolation they can be costly have limitations in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in gaining new business. In the ‘always on’ world that we (and most of our prospects) now inhabit, many feel that ‘inbound marketing’ represents the future of how we relate to and connect with customers and prospects.
Catering to this new paradigm in which buyers educate themselves, and seek out, and find sellers (rather than the reverse process in traditional outbound marketing), Marketo defines inbound marketing as ‘creating interesting, informative, valuable and even entertaining content, and then optimizing and distributing it across different online channels so it can be found by – and engage – prospective buyers early in their process.’
So let’s look at just a few of the ways Marketo facilitates and streamlines inbound marketing efforts for its clients, starting with creation of simple landing pages that customers can click through to from any number of online marketing ‘vehicles,’ such as an HTML email with links to the page, a banner advertisement, or a Google Adword. At the most basic level, Seth Godin defines the landing page as the first page someone who clicks on your site sees. If this is a page that offers content of extreme interest and value to potential viewers, it can also have a short form that must be filled out (or partially filled out) before the viewer gains full access to the content, thereby allowing the marketer to collect critical contact data on parties who want to know more about some aspect of their offering.
Regardless of what you plan to require of viewers when they reach a landing page, Marketo software makes the creation process clean and simple. As with the development of HTML emails, Marketo requires no knowledge of HTML or technical expertise – you can create a landing page in minutes by using the drag-and-drop feature and add forms, polls, and simple share tools along with your text and images. And the bottom line? All of these features increase the chances of converting a prospect to a paying customer.
And in terms of search engine optimization (SEO)/search engine marketing (SEM), Marketo also enables you to take inbound marketing to the next level with search marketing, which is of course how prospects find you online without having been contacted first. Using Marketo, you can choose the right keywords for your industry, track those keywords to ensure maximum effectiveness, create content that attracts the prospects who are most likely to buy your products and services, test landing pages, and much more.
While attracting prospects to your landing pages, you can also use Marketo’s insight features to track visitors to your website and see which ones click through, where they came from, what they click, and how long they visit specific pages. This analysis capability allows you to concentrate most on marketing efforts associated with prospects that have a higher (apparent) interest in and greater likelihood of converting from prospect to client.
As with all of the technologies we support, Tokara has become a Marketo partner to provide the best possible sales and marketing outcomes for our clients. In combination with our results-oriented CRM solutions, the email marketing functionality within Marketo’s marketing automation platform is poised to bring your marketing campaigns to the next level and elicit dramatic results from your prospects and clients.
For details on Marketo marketing automation software, or to find out more about how our consultants can deliver this functionality to your business as a Marketo partner, please contact any member of our consulting team at [email protected]. We also encourage you to contact Tokara’s VP of Business Development, Mark Fillingim, directly at +1 972-719-0213.
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